Europeana Fashion: A New Cross-Museum Database

Have you heard about Europeana Fashion yet? It’s an attempt to the take the fashion-related collections from a number of European museums and put them into one big database. Sounds cool right? Well it is!

The up side is that there are some museum collections in there that I hadn’t previously seen online before, and it’s a one-stop-shop to search them.

The down side is that each museum is using their own terminology to describe items, in their own language, so you have to search it using not just English terms but also Italian, French, Swedish, Greek, and more. Furthermore, there’s no standardization of terms — something can be a “dress” or a “costume” or an “ensemble,” etc. And, most importantly to me, there’s NO way to search by date, other than a keyword search — so “18th century” will find you results where the database has listed the date that way (and not “1700s” or “1759” or in another language).

That being said, I was excited to find that the costume collections of the Palazzo Pitti, which I hadn’t seen online previously, are in this collection, AND their images are relatively high resolution. I did some poking around specifically in their collection, although even I couldn’t get through all of it. Here are some highlights of what I found:

(Note: since this is an Italian museum, their descriptions are in Italian)

I don’t speak Italian even though my maternal grandfather was from Italy. I’m not able to translate the descriptions , but can help with the titles which are fairly self explanatory especially for those of you who study and reproduce historical dress.
Here we go…